at night, the dim glow of lamp-light showed through open doorway, or flimsy curtain from within.  They stood alone, but curiously united and self-sufficing, upon the treeless inhospitable piece of land, ringed by the rivers, the great whispering reed-beds and the tide.  Their life was strangely apart from, defiant of, that of the mainland and the village.  It yielded obedience to traditions and customs of an earlier, wilder age; and in so much was sinister, a little frightening.  Yet out of precisely this rather primitive and archaic environment came Darcy Faircloth, her half-brother, the human being closest to her by every tie of blood and sentiment in the world save one—­the father of them both.  The situation was startling, alike in its incongruities and in its claims.

During those two years of continental wandering—­following upon her meeting with him at Marseilles—­the whole sweet and perplexing matter of Faircloth had fallen more or less into line, taking on a measure of simplicity and of ease.  She thought of him with freedom, wrote to him when he could advise her of his next port of call.—­To him at Deadham, by his request, he being very careful for her, she never wrote.—­And therefore, all the more perhaps, being here at Deadham, his home and all the suggestive accessories of it so constantly before her eyes, did her relation to him suffer a painful transformation.  In remembrance she had come to picture him on board his ship, governing his little floating kingdom with no feeble or hesitating sway.  But here every impeding fact of class and education, every worldly obstacle to his and her intercourse, above all the hidden scandal of his birth sprang into high relief.  All the dividing, alienating influences of his antecedents, his social position and her own, swung in upon her with aggravated intensity and pathos.

Away, she felt sweetly secure of him.  Sure his and her bond remained inviolate.  Sure his affection never wavered or paled, but stood always at the flood, a constant quantity upon which she could draw at need; or—­to change the metaphor—­a steady foundation upon which her heart could safely build.  He would not, could not, ever fail her.  This had been sufficient to stay her longing for sight and speech of him, her longing for his bodily presence.  But now, in face of the very concrete facts of the island, the inn, which bore his name and where his mother lived and ruled, of the property he owned, the place and people to which—­by half at least of his nature and much more than half his memory—­he belonged, the comfort of this spiritual esoteric relation became but a meagre evasive thing.  It was too unsubstantial.  Doubts and fears encircled it.  She grew heart-sick for some fresh testimony, some clear immediate assurance that time and absence had not staled or undermined the romance.